Activists (Killed)

Alexander Valterovich Litvinenko (30 August 1962 – 23 November 2006) was a Russian FSB agent who defected to the United Kingdom in 2000 and became a critic of Vladimir Putin’s regime. He was assassinated, on Putin’s orders, by the FSB via radiation poisoning in 2006.

Alexander Valterovich Litvinenko was born in Voronezh, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union on 4 December 1962, and he served in the Internal Troops of the Ministry of Internal Affairs during the 1980s. In 1986, he was recruited by the KGB counterintelligence section, and he entered the Military Counter Intelligence in 1988. During the 1990s, he specialized in counter-terrorist activities and the infiltration of organized crime, and, in 1994, he was assigned to the oligarch Boris Berezovsky’s security detail after a number of assassination attempts were made against him. In November 1998, Litvinenko and several other FSB officers publicly accused their superiors of being behind the attempts on Berezovsky’s life, and Litvinenko was arrested the following March for insubordination. He was acquitted in November 1999 but re-arrested before the charges were again dismissed in 2000, and he fled with his family to London, England, where he was granted asylum. He became a journalist, writer, and consultant for the British intelligence services, and he wrote two books, accusing the Russian security services of staging the Russian apartment bombings and other terrorist acts in order to bring Vladimir Putin to power, as well as claiming that Putin was behind the murder of prominent journalist Anna Politkovskaya in October 2006. Litvinenko also converted to Islam in solidarity with the Chechens, who were fighting for independence from Russia.

On 1 November 2006, Litvinenko met with former KGB agents Dmitry Kovtun and Andrey Lugovoy, and Kovtun left polonium traces in the house and car Litvinenko had used in Hamburg, Germany. Later that day, Litvinenko suddenly fell ill, and he died of an overnight heart attack on 23 November 2006. In January 2016, Britain found that Litvinenko’s murder was an FSB operation that was probably personally approved by Putin himself.